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Reflections on Modesty

By Donald DeMarco

Flannery O'Connor is acknowledged as one of the most
original and provocative writers of our time. She has been ranked with
Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald among America's finest prose stylists.
Given her literary accomplishments, it was once suggested to her that someone
would write her biography. O'Connor dismissed the notion. "There won't
be any biographies of me", she said, "for only one reason, lives spent between the house
and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." (1)

She was alluding to the illness that confined her
to her mother's chicken farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, a few miles outside
of Atlanta. Lupus erythematosus, a devastating and incurable neurological
disorder that can be kept at bay only with drugs and a highly disciplined
existence, had claimed her father. It ended O'Connor's life when she was
thirty-nine. She gave herself daily injections, hobbled around on aluminum
crutches, and could write for no more than two hours a day.

What she was
able to accomplish, given her infirmity, was remarkable. But she did not
complain. In fact, she regarded sickness before death a very appropriate
occurence that allowed her to receive special mercies from God. "to expect
too much", she held, "is to have a sentimental view of life." (2)

She was wrong about the literary world's interest
in her. Her letters, published under the title A Habit of Being, brought
her added fame after she died. The collection made the best-seller list
and established Flannery O'Connor as the most memorable character she ever
transcribed to paper. (3)

Throughout the 617 pages of correspondence, she either
ignored her deteriorating health or mentioned it offhandedly. In one letter
she wrote: "I owe my existence to the pituitary glands of thousands of
pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois, at the Armour packing plant.
If pigs wore garments, I wouldn't be worthy to kiss the hems of them."
She saw even her use of crutches as an occasion to laugh at herself: "My
greatest exertion and pleasure these last years has been throwing the garbage
to the chickens and I can still do this, though I am in danger of going
with it." (4)

She abhorred pomposity of any stripe and sprinkled
her letters with plenty of "ain'ts" and "naws". She also expressed wariness
of "innerleckchuls". (5) To a correspondent who had expressed uneasiness
in writing to a celebrity, she pointed out that fame is "a comic distinction
shared with Roy Rogers' horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955". Her letter-writing
was unimpeachably democratic. "Mail is very eventful to me", she said,
"I never mind writing anybody." (6)

Etienne Gilson said that Thomas Aquinas possessed
two virtues to an exceptional degree: a perfect intellectual modesty and
an almost reckless intellectual audacity. (7) Much the same could be said
of O'Connor. There was not the slightest hint of sentimentality in her
view of life. Her intellectual modesty allowed her to see things as they
really are, and her intellectual audacity gave her the nerve to be painfully
candid. "If you live today you breathe in nihilism", she said. "In or out
of the Church,
it's the gas you breathe." (8)

O'Connor audaciously tackled the nihilistic assumptions
of modern philosophy with stories about ordinary people from her own backyard.
The culture of O'Connor's South was shaped, in part, by class-conscious
social behavior, sentimentalized reminiscences of the antebellum golden
age, and rationalizations of the injustices that remained from the legacy of slavery.

Understanding the smugness of the Southern middle class, O'Connor saw,
perhaps more plainly than most, the self-satisfaction that was spreading
throughout the country during the postwar prosperity of the 1950s. Her
characters, like herself, inhabit a narrow world, but their relevance reaches
far beyond it.

O'Connor used her art to shake and sharpen the sensibilities
of an American society that had grown morally soft and philosophically
unfocused. She created shocking characters and narrated their misdeeds
with graphic grotesqueness in order to jolt people back to an awareness
of reality. The unvarnished truth her stories expose is that we are all
grotesque, in some way or another. But there is hope, even for the grotesque.

O'Connor's realism was informed by her Catholic faith.
"For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I
see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.This means for me the meaning
of life is centered in our Redemption in Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. I don't think
that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly
easy in these times to make transparent in fiction." (9)

Her modesty allowed her to realize the difficulty
of her task, and it protected her from discouragement when her art was
misunderstood by both critics and the general public. Unintimidated by
popular trends or prominent people, she remained faithful to her vision
to the end.